Optical pulse shaping is a technique used to control the quantum states of atoms and molecules of a coherent pulsed laser by application of an electric field with phases and amplitudes at selected frequencies. By controlling the amplitudes and phases of the frequencies of the laser, optical communication of spectrally shaped pulses is possible. Current optical communication technology is throughput limited because of the inability to utilize high-speed modulation techniques, including Multi-bit Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (“QAM”) and M-ary Phase Shift Keying. Using such high-speed modulation techniques requires the optical communication technology to have the ability to have a local carrier phase reference at a receiver synchronized to a remote carrier of a transmitter across a plurality of pulses. Because synchronization of signals at the receiver with the transmitter is problematic in optical communication with spectrally shaped pulses, not requiring synchronization of signals to achieve higher communication throughput is desired. Accordingly, an improved coherent optical communication system having spectrally shaped pulses is needed.